Law firm marketing and business development strategies

Your lead generation efforts are being wasted useless you have a system to nurture and convert them. “I don’t have time” is no longer a valid excuse with the software that’s available today to practically turn this process into an automated one for you and your firm.

Here are 5 steps you can take right now to better manage and convert your leads:

Only ask for crucial information. Research shows that contact forms with only three fields convert 25% more leads than those with more fields. You really only need a name and an email address these days. People don’t want to give out more than that for a first contact, so don’t put stumbling blocks in your own way right off the bat. Keep it really simple.

Follow up fast. I’ve said it over and over again, but it bears repeating: NEVER make an attorney responsible for following up with a lead! You can program auto responses that follow up for you immediately once you receive a new lead. Studies show that after an hour passes with no response, the chances of doing business with that lead are reduced by 10x.

Make it about them. Be sure you ask the right questions and record the information you receive from the lead in a central place so whomever is tasked with another follow-up has the information they need to provide relevant feedback to that lead. Nothing is more annoying to a prospect than having to explain themselves again and again.

Focus on the next step. Your goal should be to get that lead into your office or on a phone conference as quickly as you can after they initiate contact. Make it your goal to follow up with next steps within one hour of their contacting you and you will see your conversion rates increase.

Pay attention. According to inbound marketing firm HubSpot, 50% of new leads are not ready to buy — which means they need constant attention to move them along to a purchase. Having a system in place that allows you to pre-program a series of emails to nurture prospects takes the task off your hands while still getting the job done.

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Practice Made Perfect for Lawyers CD Set

The Practice Made Perfect CD set and manual applies Stephen Fairley’s unique High Impact Marketing System to the practice-building challenges faced by solo practitioners and partners at small law firms.

It includes dozens of specific marketing and sales recommendations that can be easily and quickly applied to your firm, including:

The only 7 sure-fire ways to get clients in your door NOW

Why advertising doesn’t work for most small law firms

The 7 reasons why people don’t buy from you

How to market and sell with USP’s (Unique Selling Proposition)

Using audio logos to attract immediate attention for your business

Using low-cost, high impact marketing strategies

Strategies for achieving maximum results from all of your marketing efforts

How to discover your Ideal Target Market

3 critical factors to remember when looking for new clients

The NEW sales cycle for professional services

How to retain your best clients

Click here to order your Practice Made Perfect for Lawyers CD set and manual now.

Kevin O’Keefe over at Real Lawyers Have Blogs picked up on it too, but his take is a little different than mine regarding one of those stats: that 40% of small law firms don’t have a website.

(Actually, I would dispute this stat in the first place. Looking at the sources they used to create the infographic, looks like they may have extrapolated data from a 2014 study of AmLaw 50 websites and applied it to small firms and solos. Based on my personal experience of speaking to, coaching and training over 1,000 attorneys per year, with the vast majority being small and solos, I estimate it’s less than 10% that don’t have a website.)

Anyway, Kevin says that some of the best attorneys he knows are in small firms or solos and they have all the work they want. Most of their work comes from word of mouth and building relationships, not a website.

Nothing wrong with that, certainly. And if you have all the work you want and will continue that trend for the rest of your career, then you just may not need a website.

But how do you know what is true today will be true tomorrow?

Forget straight lead generation for a moment. What about just letting people know you exist? The fact is, even when someone gives a referral, the person they are referring you to will undoubtedly do a little checking up on you before placing a call. And the first place they are likely to go is on the Internet.

What will your absence say about you in this case?

If you want a thriving business today, you need a strong presence online. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need a robust lead generation site if you have all the work you can handle. But you need something. Maybe just a blog that shows how expert you are in your field of practice. Something.

Probably the most troubling stat below is that only 14% of law firms send a triggered email to a visitor who submits an online form. This means that your website is generating leads for you that are going exactly nowhere. For very little expense, you can get software that will allow you to respond immediately to inbound leads from your site without any intervention from you, and lead prospects down a predetermined path to becoming a client.

The last stat in the infographic below– that 35% of legal consumers start their search for an attorney online — is a bit misleading. A comprehensive research study conducted by LexisNexis® Martindale-Hubbell® in 2012 found that 76% of consumers who sought an attorney in the past year used online resources. Maybe 35% start online, but 76% go online at some time in the selection process — which is the more compelling statistic for me.

At any rate, what these stats mean to me is that there is still lots of opportunity when it comes to legal marketing for solos and small firms. Unless you already have all the work you will ever need or want.

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Attend a Rainmaker Retreat in the Comfort of Your Own Home or Office with “Rainmaker Retreat: Unplugged” DVD Set

The 6 DVD set is a live recording of the Rainmaker Retreat, a 2-day legal marketing intensive led by legal marketing expert Stephen Fairley that covers over 65 proven online and offline marketing and business development strategies for law firms.

You will discover:

Lead Generation Techniques: how to generate more leads from the Internet, social media and blogs.

Lead Conversion Techniques: a proven system to track incoming leads and improve your conversion rates to turn more of those prospects into paying clients.

Client Retention Techniques: specific tools to double your referrals and to help you with “Building a Lifestyle Law Firm®”

Engaging activities to help you identify your ideal target market so you can powerfully market to them.

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners v. Federal Trade Commission, ruling that a regulatory body of a self-regulated profession (dentists in this case, but the law would apply as well) are only immune from antitrust liability if they are actively supervised by state governmental authorities.

The case concerned alleged violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act for unfair competition when the NC Board of Dental Examiners sent cease-and-desist letters to non-dentist teeth-whitening entities throughout the state, claiming they were engaging in the unauthorized practice of dentistry. The FTC stepped in to halt the anticompetitive behavior, and the SCOTUS decision yesterday upheld the FTC’s ruling that the NC dental group had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.

The high court agreed with the FTC’s claim that state exemptions from federal antitrust laws do not apply when a self-regulating board is not actively supervised by the state, especially when it is made up of self-interested private businesses.

Following the decision, LegalZoom immediately issued a press release with the headline, “Supreme Court Sides With LegalZoom in North Carolina Dental Board Antitrust Decision.” LegalZoom is currently in litigation with the NC State Bar, which has sent cease-and-desist letters to non-lawyer service providers in that state, and filed an amicus brief supporting the FTC in this case.

What interests me most is the effect this decision will have on state bar advertising review committees, especially those in Florida and Nevada that have been particularly hardheaded and backwards when it comes to attorney marketing.

As Josh noted in his post yesterday, he believes this decision is the end of those committees since the Supreme Court imposed the “active supervision” mandate that requires, “The supervisor must review the substance of the anticompetitive decision, not merely the procedures followed to produce it.”

He tends to believe — and I am hopeful — that the states don’t really want to be in the business of actively supervising state bar committee decisions.

There are some states whose bars are run by the judiciary that this decision would not impact. The states without unified bars include IL, OH, PA, NJ and NY.

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FREE On-Demand Webinar: How Law Firms Can Use Dashboards to Save Time, Increase Productivity and Close More Cases

Do you have the critical numbers you need to run your law firm efficiently at your fingertips? Dashboards have been used by businesses for years, but law firms have been slow to adapt them to running a more efficient, effective enterprise.

A dashboard provides you with insights into what is working — and what is not — in your marketing programs and other areas of your business. Rainmaker Institute CEO Stephen Fairley and law firm management expert Micki Love, COO of Hughes & Coleman Injury Lawyers, lead you through this free webinarwhere you will learn:

5 key metrics every law firm must be tracking every month

How to save 100 minutes a day with dashboards

Key performance indicators for law firms

How a business dashboard can help you grow your law firm

3 areas to audit each month to ensure staff compliance

5 critical questions to ask yourself to create your own dashboard

Hughes & Coleman is a personal injury law firm with seven offices in Kentucky and Tennessee. Micki has demonstrated the knowledge it takes to lead a staff of more than 100 employees and to grow a firm across the country. She has consulted with countless law firms on law firm management, giving them direction and building their knowledge of legal management and marketing.

Register online now to get immediate access to the free one-hour webinar on How Law Firms Can Use Dashboards to Save Time, Increase Productivity and Close More Cases.

Some changes in the legal marketing landscape to pass along to you this week:

Total Attorneys Acquired by Internet Brands

Internet Brands is the company that gutted Martindale-Hubbell, Nolo and Lawyers.com (I wrote about that exactly one year ago today here.) Total Attorneys is a 13-year-old company based in Chicago that focuses on lead generation for small and mid-sized law firms. An Internet Brands press release says the Total Attorneys brand will “remain intact” and the company will continue to operate from Chicago. Time will tell.

Avvo Running TV Ads

Avvo has two TV spots — “When You Need a Lawyer” and “Let’s Find Your Divorce Lawyer” –that it is running nationally. According to TV commercial tracker ispot.tv, the spots have already aired more than 500 times on networks like CMT, trutv and SyFy. Here are the spots:

According to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, there are now more than two million small businesses advertising on Facebook. What’s nice about Facebook advertising is you can get very granular with your target market, zooming in to capture users by age, sex, location, ethnicity, interests and more.

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NEW FREE REPORT: How to Tap Into One of the Most Cost Effective Marketing Tools for Law Firms & 4 Steps to Get Started Today

In less than a few hours a month, you can produce an effective electronic newsletter, also known as an “E-newsletter.”

An E-newsletter is a customized electronic newsletter that is commonly used in business, but rarely in the field of law. If you are truly interested in the long-term success and sustainability of your practice, you need to learn how to leverage technology and the Internet to build it.

Owners of small law firms and solos are some of the busiest lawyers I know, and it’s extremely difficult to strike a balance between your business and personal lives. While we all like to think that our work sustains us, it is our family and friends who play a key role in how happy we are in life.

The best advice I always give to attorneys struggling to find some balance is to turn to systems and processes to run as much of your business as possible without your personal intervention. In other words, modernize your firm! There are so many great, inexpensive software programs and free applications that can help you achieve this.

MyCase, a web-based legal practice management software firm, recently conducted a survey among solos and small firms to ask them what steps they would be taking in 2015 to modernize their firms. They received 800 responses to their survey, and the results are displayed in the infographic below.

Almost half of the respondents said they plan to update their website this year. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that a law firm’s website is a critical component of a successful lead generation program.

However, don’t stop there. You need a system to manage and nurture your leads so you can turn them into clients. By having an auto-responder email system in place, you can send pre-written emails according to a schedule you establish in your system that educates prospects more about your firm, the steps they should take next, testimonials from previous clients, a free consultation offer, etc.

The goal is to lead the prospect along the buying path and get them to do what you want – call, set an appointment, etc. And it’s all done automatically, with no intervention from you or your staff needed until the prospect calls and your regular intake process begins.

Most of the solos and small firms we know have a finite amount of time to dedicate to legal marketing, so having a process in place that nurtures a lead along the path to becoming a client is a great benefit.

Building an effective, efficient intake system will do more for your firm’s bottom line than just about any other legal marketing activity. The money you spend on generating leads is wasted if calls to your firm go unanswered, unreturned or answered improperly.

Last week, Adam Warren penned a post on the National Trial Lawyers Association blog on In House Client Intake vs. Call Centers. Adam has years of experience in lead generation for mass torts attorneys through his firm, The Sentinel Group. Based on that experience, Adam writes that acquiring cases is much better when a firm has an in-house call center to handle leads.

Here are his 10 rules for success in building a profitable intake center for law firms:

Answer the phone with the name of the firm stated clearly.

Test several versions of intake scripts to see which perform best and train your operators thoroughly on those scripts.

Use intake specialists who can speak clearly.

Always be polite.

Do not engage in any arguments.

Strive for efficiency but don’t be short. If it’s clear the call is going nowhere, politely end the call.

Answer on the first two rings.

Do not use a computerized system to segment calls (“press 1 for…”) — most people will hang up.

Be sure your intake center is working 24/7.

If you are driving gender-specific calls, have a person of the same gender answering the phone.

We routinely “secret shop” law firms, posing as potential clients to gauge the effectiveness of a law firm’s intake process. Based on hundreds of these calls over the past year, we have developed a list of 12 best practices to improve your legal intake system which I wrote about in a post entitled, 12 Tips to Improve Your Intake Process.

Your intake process is the first important step in having a lead conversion system that delivers a steady stream of new clients to your firm. Use Adam’s tips and mine to review your current process and see where improvements can be made. I guarantee your bottom line will benefit.

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On-Demand Seminar: How to Convert Leads Into Paying Clients

After paying your employees, the most costly part of your law firm is Lead Generation.

This yearyour law firm will spend almost 10 times as much generating new leads as it does servicing existing clients!

Generating leads for your law firm is very expensive, yet a common complaint of many attorneys is that they “need more leads.”

Lead Conversion is the most overlooked area at most law firms and it has the potential to save you tens of thousands of dollars this year!

How? By helping you convert more of those costly leads into more paying clients!

Get this on-demand seminar to learn:

3 major areas to examine when analyzing your law firm

5 numbers every law firm must track to increase their conversion rates

A simple diagnostic tool you can use to track your leads and fix your follow up

I travel a lot. Just this week, I flew to San Diego for the DigitalMarketer Traffic & Conversion Seminar, to Palm Springs to speak at the Primerus Personal Injury Institute’s seminar and then to Las Vegas for our two-day legal marketing boot camp, the Rainmaker Retreat.

Pass on the vouchers and take the cash. If you are bumped from a flight due to overbooking, do not take that voucher the airline is so quick to offer you. The U.S. Dept. of Transportation’s compensation rules for airlines says that if your carrier fails to book you on another flight within two hours of your original flight, they owe you cash — up to $1,300. They are also required to tell you that you can get a check on the spot.

You can still get cash for overbooking delays. Even if the airline can get you to where you want to go between 1-2 hours on a domestic flight (1-4 hours on international flights), it owes you compensation of 200% of the one-way fare, up to $650.

Cheapest days to fly are not necessarily the cheapest days to buy. The cheapest days to fly are Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays but they are not necessarily the cheapest days to purchase your ticket.

Cancel within 24 hours of booking for no charge. On most airlines, you can cancel or change your ticket within 24 hours of booking your trip if that trip is more than 7 days out and get a full refund. One exception: American Airlines. You will have had to book your travel directly on the airline’s website. If you fly Southwest, you can change your plans up until takeoff with no penalty.

Delayed luggage? Make ‘em pay. The DOT says airlines owe you up to $3,300 in liability for a domestic trip if your luggage was delayed and you had to replace those items during your trip. Just be sure to keep your receipts.

You can deplane after 3 hours. The DOT says an airline cannot keep you on a plane for more than three hours for a domestic flight or four hours for an international flight during a tarmac delay.

The airline must pay for alternate carriers. If you are delayed and the airline puts you on another carrier, they have to pay all the expenses (including any extra fees) the new carrier may assess. And if there is only a first class seat available, it’s yours.

In the cases of #7, you can keep your original ticket. If you are put on another carrier (#7 above), you still get to keep your original ticket for later use.

Get later compensation, even if that means miles or vouchers. Most airlines are reluctant to hand over a check right away. File a complaint and state that you will accept a voucher or miles and they will more likely oblige.

Non-refundable ticket? Not necessarily so. If the airline is at fault and your flight is severely delayed, canceled or there is a schedule or route change, you are entitled to a full refund on a non-refundable ticket.

Knowing these rights may not make you feel any better about airline travel these days, but at least you know there is some cash in it for you when the airlines screw up.

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Free On-Demand Webinar: 6 Key Numbers Every Attorney Must Know

There are 6 financial numbers every lawyer running and growing a business needs to understand and review every month. Unfortunately, many attorneys don’t have the systems in place to obtain these numbers or they don’t know which numbers are the most critical to their business.

If you don’t know your numbers you cannot build a financially successful law firm! This webinar will provide you with the tools you need to accurately gauge the financial stability and health of your business.

In this information-packed webinar you will discover:

The 6 key financial numbers you need to track

How to determine your cash flow position so you can plan for future growth

According to the ABA’s 2014 Legal Technology Survey Report, attorneys are using social media marketing more than ever before, with solos and small firms leading the way in engaging on social media networks, blogging and website development.

According to the ABA report, LinkedIn is by far the most popular social media destination for attorneys, with 99% of large firms (100+ attorneys), 97% of mid-size firms (10-49 attorneys), 94% of small firms (2-9 attorneys) and 93% of solos having a LinkedIn profile.

Solos dominate Facebook, with 45% reporting participation compared with 38% of small firms and just 21% of large firms. Larger firms appear to favor Twitter, with 36% saying their firms maintain a Twitter presence compared with 16% of mid-size firms, 13% of solos and 12% of small firms.

When it comes to blogging, 24% of law firms overall report having a blog and 39% of attorneys say they have obtained clients from blogging. In comparison, 35% of attorneys say they have obtained clients from their social networks.

So according to the data, blogging delivers more clients than social media but fewer lawyers are engage in blogging than social media. (Opportunity!)

This infographic from MyCase.com details how attorneys are using social media in 2015:

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FREE REPORT: How Law Firms Use Blogging to Get More Leads, Increase Website Traffic & Become an Industry Thought Leader

One of the secret tools of Internet marketing for attorneys is the power of having a targeted blog. Inbound marketing firm Hubspot released a report based on a marketing benchmark study of 7,000 companies and found that when it comes to blogging:

Companies that blog 15+ times per month get five times more traffic than firms with no blog.

B2B companies that blog at least twice a month get 70% more leads from their websites than firms with no blog.

Companies that increase their blogging from 3-5 times per month to 5-8 times per month almost double their leads.

How many leads are you getting from your website or blog each month? It should be enough to justify the investment you’ve made, and the number should also be growing with time.

Most law firms have a website, but many have made the common mistake of treating their site like an online brochure. Here are some steps you need to take that can double your Internet and website leads:

Clean up your onsite optimization. If you don’t know SEO, then this is definitely something you need to farm out. Your title tags should reflect what each page’s content is about and each one should be unique to the content on that page. Have page headers (i.e., “Scottsdale Car Accident Attorney”) that represent each page’s content, as Google will pull that up in search results. Have meta descriptions that motivate prospects to click on your link in search results. Pay attention to your URL structure and be sure the terms in the URL represent the focus of each page on your website.

Strengthen your onsite content. When it comes to content, more is better and better is better. So what is good quality content? It all depends on your user. What is your prospective client going online to find? Probably not a laundry list of your accomplishments (although you do want that too). They are looking for usable information that is relevant to their situation. FAQs are a great way to accomplish this, with quick links to even more detailed content on that particular subject. For example, if you are a personal injury attorney, you will want to have content for every type of accident your prospects are likely to encounter — car, truck, bicycle, motorcycle, pedestrian, etc.

Market like a news publisher. Did you know that you could hang just about everything you do on the Internet (marketing-wise) to a great blog? A blog is the best way for lawyers to establish their credibility and build an online reputation that will help draw potential clients to you. Here’s how it works:

Create a blog on your website

Post to it 3-5 times per week with relevant, original content

Link your blog posts to your social media profiles and pages

Watch your traffic and search results improve

Embrace mobile and offer a great mobile experience for prospects. Mobile platforms have now surpassed desktop computers in terms of where consumers access online content. And if you do not have a website that is optimized for mobile, then you are letting leads fall through your fingers. Consumer attorneys especially need to have mobile websites, since it is far more likely your services will be needed when a mobile device is the only convenient one at hand. Research shows that 40% of mobile searches are local, and 81% of those searches lead to action — a phone call or email to your firm.

Improve your Local Search. Local search is becoming increasingly important when trying to improve the ranking for your law firm website on Google and other search engines. After all, someone searching for an attorney in Scottsdale will not care about a lawyer in Scarsdale…and Google knows that. Google is all about delivering relevant search results to its users…hence, the importance of doing whatever you can to rank well for local search.

Update your photography and improve your bio page. Every attorney on your website should have a current photo; to make the quality consistent, I recommend you have custom photography taken. Consider making it unique by having more casual shots taken outdoors at local landmarks people will recognize. Make your bio a narrative, not a resume. Frankly, your prospect doesn’t care where you want to law school or that you were on the rowing team — leave that for the end of the bio. And always include videos on your site! This gives prospects a true feel for what it’s like to do business with you.

Make it easy to contact you. On every page of your website you should have three ways for people to contact you: your phone number prominently displayed at the top of your site (in the header), a contact form that people can fill out that asks for their name, email or phone and a Comments box, and a Live Chat function that allows a prospect to chat online with someone immediately. Our clients tell us some of their best and hottest leads are chat leads and many are converting into good cases.

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Free On-Demand Webinar: 6 Key Numbers Every Attorney Must Know

There are 6 financial numbers every lawyer running and growing a business needs to understand and review every month. Unfortunately, many attorneys don’t have the systems in place to obtain these numbers or they don’t know which numbers are the most critical to their business.

If you don’t know your numbers you cannot build a financially successful law firm! This webinar will provide you with the tools you need to accurately gauge the financial stability and health of your business.

In this information-packed webinar you will discover:

The 6 key financial numbers you need to track

How to determine your cash flow position so you can plan for future growth

Most of the attorneys I know understand the need for a website for their law firm and they have one. The more progressive lawyers have more than one. By now we all know that a vast majority of consumers start their search for an attorney on the Internet. Research has borne this out time and again.

It is an undeniable fact that if you do not have a robust online presence, you are risking becoming irrelevant. Your firm is not even part of the discussion for people who are looking for an attorney that practices the kind of law they need. I don’t know of a single law firm that wants that.

And yet, there are still attorneys who look at their online strategy as a “have to have” instead of a marketing machine. There are attorneys I have worked with who have had massive success with their website, bringing a steady stream of new clients into their practice, and others whose website has not made them a nickel.

I have worked with over 10,000 law firms and have seen just about every kind of website there is. Some are great, many are good, and unfortunately, there are some that are really bad. As you can imagine, the attorneys who have the bad websites are the ones who think online marketing is a waste of time and money. And for them, they are right!

So what makes the difference between a great website and one that is ineffective? It begins with having a purpose. Let me clear this up right away:

The purpose of a law firm website is to grow revenue by attracting a steady stream of the right kind of clients to your practice.

Stephen Covey, author of the book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” says that one of the cardinal rules is to ‘begin with the end in mind’. The ‘end in mind’ you should be thinking about when creating a website is, how can I make my law firm visible to every single potential client possible? Are there other desirable outcomes from your website? Of course! Here are a few:

Develop firm brand awareness

Create service awareness

Book appointments

Provide client support

Save time and money

But please understand the #1 most important reason for your website is for lead generation and conversion. So if you have a website that is not producing the results you want, it’s time to make some changes.

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On-Demand Seminar: How to Leverage Your Firm’s Website to Win Clients

According to recent research…

58 million adults looked for an attorney in the past year

76% of them referred to the Internet at some point in their search

While most law firms already have a website, the majority of them don’t produce new cases on a regular basis. Why?

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About Stephen Fairley

Stephen is the CEO of The Rainmaker Institute, the nation’s largest law firm marketing company specializing in lead conversion for small to medium size law firms. Over 10,000 attorneys nationwide have benefited from learning and implementing the proven marketing and lead conversion strategies taught by The Rainmaker Institute, LLC.

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About the rainmker institute

The law firm marketing consultants at The Rainmaker Institute specialize in helping small to medium-sized law firms generate more clients and increase revenue fast.

Since 1999, we have helped over 10,000 attorneys create successful and sustainable law practices. Over 35 of the largest state and local bar associations have sponsored our live law firm marketing seminars and Rainmaker Retreats to their members.